The “new archivist” that Gilles Deleuze sees in Foucault, is said to have created something “fundamentally new”. He cuts a “diagonal” through the archive, into the language families, given language orders, a cut that moves between science, everyday sentences, schizophrenic ‘nonsense’. The new archivist wants to become mobile and no longer cares about the juxtaposition of sentences, about the keyboard of the machine, about possible interpretations from prepositions and stratifications. She/he does not want to ‘speak about the other’ nor to follow the dialectic of contradiction or the hierarchy of abstraction because these formalisations do not allow to distinguish the possible from the real. She/he says, according to Deleuze, ‘that from now on he/she will take only statements into account’ because ‘the statement is not virtual – it manifests a reality with its omissions and gaps.’

In the Möglichkeitsraum I invited curators and cultural producers to imagine themselves in the role of a ‘new archivist’ and to stage their work with film and video archives as a ‘screen performance’ in order to gain perspectives on mediality, the history of film images that shapes the politics of memory in our societies today. In the Möglichkeitsraum, cinema, theatre stage and assembly space intertwine. It is a theatrical archive, an extended editing room with a double projection, with image-mixers, sound-mixers, archival data disks and the performance stage. Each session is specially elaborated for the possibility of a given archive.

In this screening, we show a programme from the Möglichkeitsraum 2: The Life of an Archive with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin.